Chirping tree frogs and locusts and flashing fireflies produce glorious sounds and sights on a warm springtime evening in Missouri
On most warm spring evenings our youngest daughter, Hannah, would feed the cats on the back porch. It was a job she loved. She would stand right outside the backdoor with a box of “Little Friskies” Cat Food shaking it and rationing the cat food out to our poor hungry cats, which mewed in anticipation hoping to get a delicious morsel. Her green eyes would twinkle as she gave a black cat a morsel and a calico another morsel. Tossing her long blonde pony tail Hannah said, “Here, Golden Sunshine, eat your food!” And he would gobble it up. Then laughing she would eat a morsel as well. “Hannah! Do not eat the cat food! Yuk!” By the way she no longer eats cat food!
On this particular evening I am remembering her Dad sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, Hannah grabbed the box of cat food stepped out the backdoor to feed the cats. She barely put one foot out the back door, when she suddenly burst back into the house with huge green eyes and a look of surprise on her face. She said, “Dad, I just saw A GIANT RAT!” Her Dad immediately jumped up to take a look. He said, “Why that is a possum! It does look like a rat with short grey hair and a long hairless tail. I do not want it eating our cats’ food.” He, then, ran the possum off of the back porch by jumping up and down and hooting and hollering like he just sat on a cactus! That was a quite a hilarious spectacle! It is safe to say that the possum would not return anytime soon!
Hannah learned 3 life lessons from this experience: not to eat cat food, the difference between a possum and a rat, and how to scare a possum away from the back porch.
By the way I want to add that Hannah was 4 years old when this happened!
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